I am the co-founder of SocialRank and previously led business development and partnerships for online integrations at Dwolla, a payments startup based in Iowa, as well as for Aviary, a NY-based startup that provides a photo editing API for web and mobile devices. I'm active in the NY tech scene as the creator of the BD Meetup and an advisor to early-stage companies and have been featured in Business Insider as one of the “Top 20 Under 25” in the NY tech scene. I write a blog called Alex’s Tech Thoughts, have been published in Fast Company, The New York Observer, The Next Web and VentureBeat, teach Business Development classes and have been quoted on many tech websites including TechCrunch, GigaOm, The New York Times, Business Insider, Mashable, and PC Magazine. I hold a BA in Economics from Yeshiva University. You can reach me at Ataub24(at)gmail(dot)com.

Raphie is a 15 year old high school student attending Georgiana Bruce Kirby High School in Santa Cruz. At AngelHACK, Raphie won third place and a huge trophy for building a project called ShareBrowse (which is currently down).

Have you ever had to explain to your grandparents how to use gmail over the phone? How about Facebook? Twitter? Youtube? If so, ShareBrowse would have been an enormous asset. The concept behind ShareBrowse is simple: a zero-install Internet helper in your browser; all you need to do is share a link from one party to the other and both sides are able to see the same site and the other user’s mouse. While the concept is already embedded in other products, ShareBrowse spans individual applications and has a very clean interface.

After Raphie blew away the crowd and judges (one of them offered him an internship at Facebook, another at Google), I had the opportunity to connect with him and chat about his project, how he learned to hack at the tender age of 15, and which companies excite him right now.

Alex Taub (AT): When did you start hacking?Raphie Palefsky-Smith (RPS): At the beginning of last school year. I’ve always been interested in tech — my dad’s in IT, and the computer gene kinda rubbed off on me. However, I wasn’t actually technical; I spent a lot of time online and worked with my school’s IT team, but I didn’t code. Last summer my friend showed me a blog post about the Teens in Tech Incubator program, and I thought it’d be a great experience — tech and business together! That was my first foray into the startup world. I started reading TechCrunch and going to meetups.

A lot of tension great between my two co-founders (of Codulous) and me. Looking back, I had unreasonable expectations for them — after all, I didn’t know anything at all about programming. So when school resumed I decided I’d learn to code myself and take matters into my own hands. I did an Independent Study in JavaScript, and to my surprise, I really enjoyed programming. From then on I’ve become progressively more technical.

AT: What have you built before?RPS: I’m very much the tons-of-little projects type. It usually goes something like this: I find a cool API/library/technique and quickly hack something together. In the process of researching for that project, I find something new and embark on a new project. So none of these are at all complete, but a pretty broad list would be: a web interface for Spotify (nodejs), Solitaire Encryption (java), various Titanium apps, Arduino projects like game controllers, command-line Blackjack, a game/signboard app for a Launchpad MIDI controller, an Epsilon-greedy AB-testing framework, a little bit of Flash Augmented Reality stuff, and a couple quizzing apps for AP Chem. This summer I’ve been interning at a company called Offerslot, and I’ve been working a lot with geodata and Google Maps. They had me learn Ruby and it’s my favorite language yet.

AT: What made you build Sharebrowse?RPS: I was planning to go to AngelHACK weeks in advance, but I’m a terrible procrastinator and delayed buying my ticket. When I finally got around to it, they were sold out! I resigned myself to going to the Reddit meetup in Golden Gate Park. However, on Friday I dropped by Firebase for their office hours (they do that every Friday). I’m a big fan of Firebase; I got my account the day they launched and immediately used it in several projects. Anyway, I had the pleasure of meeting James Tamplin, and we talked for a while before he asked if I enjoyed hackathons. I said I did, and as chance would have it, he had an extra ticket to AngelHACK! This was the day before the event, so I got on the Caltrain and began wracking my brain for ideas. I specifically wanted to do something with Firebase. It’s not that I felt obligated to make something with their API, I just thought it’d be nice to have their support (plus, I was already a big big fan of the service. After they add more security features, I’m using it for *everything*).

Since their speciality is syncing data, I tried to come up with ideas that might really benefit from that. Eventually I settled upon syncing two browsers. The tech support angle didn’t immediately jump out at me, initially I thought it’d just be really cool. The best practical application I could think of was demoing a website or avoiding the need to send a bunch of links. It wasn’t until about 30 minutes before the first demo round (with the help of Andrew from Firebase) that I settled on helping granny as the main use case — it was by far the easiest one to pitch, as almost everyone’s had that problem. Ironically, I really haven’t — my parents are all pretty good at tech — but I knew it resonated with quite a few people.

AT: Where do you want to go to college? Or do you want to go at all?RPS: I absolutely positively want to go to college. I’m gunning for Stanford, but I’d also love to go to CMU, MIT, or Cal. Maybe even an Ivy. I know a lot of startup people don’t really fit into the educational system (which I totally resonate with – it’s broken in a lot of ways), but for me it works pretty well.

AT: What do you want to do when you get older?RPS: I definitely want to code for a living after college. Hopefully as a technical cofounder of some exciting startup.

AT: Which companies are you excited about?RPS: Oh god, I’m excited about a bunch. Pretty much anything I read about on Hacker News piques my interest. The companies I’m most into *at this very moment* are Code School (awesome platform for learning), and a couple of online design sites — Easel.io, Accelsor, and Divshot. That’s a huge pain point for me. I love the html and js side of the web, but when it comes to CSS, I can design as well as John McCain can pick a running-mate. I’ve never been a visual person. At all. So the prospect of drag ‘n’ drop mercifully quick design is very welcome. BTW, ShareBrowse was designed by two lovely gents — Ben Reyes contributed to the first version, and Marc Laugharn did the final version.

On that note, there are some other people I definitely need to thank. Here’s the whole list (in no particular order; everyone was amazing): Daniel Brusilovsky, Andrew Amis, Ben Reyes, Marc Laugharn, the whole teams at AngelHACK, Firebase, Tokbox, Nodejitsu, and Offerslot, my parents, the webetalk IRC gents, and Carter Hinsley. ShareBrowse would never have been finished without people to bug about iframe permissions and socket.io.

AT: What are all your friends playing in school?RPS: Not many coders at my school, but a ton of gamers. Starcraft, TF2, and League of Legends mainly. I host a Minecraft / Ventrilo server in my living room (some other members of the gaming league do the vast majority of the admin work, I just have fast internet).

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